Thursday, November 29, 2007 Eastmincom: UN report sweeping, inaccurate By Ben O. Tesiorna
THE United Nations' report blaming the Armed Forces of the Philippines for most of the extrajudicial killings in the country is a "sweeping statement" and inaccurate.
This was how the military's Eastern Mindanao Command chief Lieutenant General Cardoso Luna, described the report made by Philip Alston released Monday.
Alston, an Australian academic assigned by the UN Human Rights Council to look into the executions, said in his final report that the military had killed leftist activists as part of a campaign against communists.
Luna said a crime is never and will never be sanctioned by the Armed Forces of the Philippines as an organization. He said that if ever some soldiers indeed committed such crimes then they did these on their own and not as part of their duty as soldiers.
Luna assured the public that in the Eastmincom area, no extrajudicial killings will be ordered against any government detractors. He said the UN must instead point its fingers at the New People's Army for many of the summary executions committed in the past years.
"Strikingly unconvincing" was however the observation made by Alston on the claim of Philippine authorities that the extrajudicial killings of leftist activists were a result of internal purges in the communist ranks.
The Davao Death Squad was also included in the 23-page report of Alston. The report scored the brazen display of arrogance by the vigilantes who killed young people involved in petty crimes.
"One fact points very strongly to the officially sanctioned character of these killings: no one involved covers his face. The men who warn mothers that their children will be the next to die unless they make themselves scarce turn up on doorsteps undisguised. The men who gun down or, and this is becoming more common, knife children in the streets almost never cover their faces. In fact, for these killers to wear bonnets is so nearly unheard of that the witnesses I interviewed did not think to mention the fact until I asked. None of those with whom I spoke had witnessed such persons covering their faces, and one knowledgeable advocate informed me that they do so in no more than two cases out of one hundred," said Alston in his report.
The UN Special Rapporteur also observed that Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, despite his being an "authoritarian populist," remains helpless in the crimes committed by the DDS.
"The mayor's positioning is frankly untenable: He dominates the city so thoroughly as to stamp out whole genres of crime, yet he remains powerless in the face of hundreds of murders committed by men without masks in view of witnesses," Alston said.
The foreigner also scored the continued denial by the Commission on Human Rights (CHR) on the existence of a vigilante group. Alston said if only the CHR has vigorously conducted its investigation, it would have known salient facts regarding the group.
"If it were not for the fact that the local office of the CHR denies the existence of a death squad, it should be capable of conducting an effective investigation. There are many witnesses who would provide information anonymously or who would testify were they to receive a credible protection arrangement," he added.
"Defending the rights of street children may be unpopular, but no one deserves to be stabbed to death for petty crimes. There are already preliminary indications that these practices are being replicated in other parts of Mindanao and in Cebu, and this trend needs to be halted immediately," Alston said.
